About Bernard Bail, M.D.

DR. BERNARD BAIL is a physician, a psychoanalyst and a training analyst who lives and practices in Beverly Hills, California. He has worked with both patients and analysts for over fifty years. Dr. Bail is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association where he chairs the ongoing discussion group “Infant Mental Life and the Dream in Psychoanalysis.” Through his intensive work in the unconscious via the dream, Dr. Bail developed a new paradigm for psychoanalysis centered at the beginning of human life.

For his military service during World War II, Dr. Bail received the Distinguished Service Cross, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air Medals, five Battle Stars in the European Theater of Operations, a Purple Heart, a Prisoner of War Medal, and the 44th Bomb Group Presidential Citation. In addition, the French government awarded Dr. Bail the French Legion of Honor, the highest military honor bestowed by France.

Dr. Bail’s prisoner of war experience in Nazi Germany, followed by his quest to become a physician and a psychoanalyst, is described in his book, Irmgard’s Flute, A Memoir.

The Mother's Signature

The Book

Facts

Excerpts

Order

“Our unconscious is our universe, and we have to accord it a vastness we may not always be able to comprehend as perhaps we cannot always comprehend the vastness of our physical universe.”
—Bernard W. Bail, M.D.

All things have a beginning, and the beginning of the mind is found in its formation within the mother. How could a mind not be influenced and formed by the force that creates and nurtures it? Nature by definition passes on the patterns of the mother into the child from the very moment of conception. This very core process of nature would affect the mind as much as it affects the body.

With an amazing clarity of insight, Dr. Bernard Bail uses his groundbreaking psychoanalytic method as a time machine, one that has allowed him to travel to the conception of mental as well as physical life. The dreams of his patients led him to explore the mother’s unconscious impact upon her embryo, fetus, and infant, and what he discovered was that the mother’s projections of her unconscious feelings into her infant’s nascent being become the seeds that determine the destiny of the child from birth until death.

A psychoanalyst and philosopher, Dr. Bail offers a theory of mind that brings us the possibility of having a rich and meaningful life. He has found that the development of higher consciousness takes place in the unconscious, and that the route to the soul emerges through the analysis of dreams. This integration of body, mind, and spirit brings us a profound understanding of the human endeavor and a vision of a better life for the individual and a better world for humankind.